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 Still, practicing these kinds of activities throughout life might
boost mental ability and provide a higher starting point before
decline, researchers write in The BMJ.
"This puts the 'use it or lose it' conjecture into question," said
lead author Roger Staff of the University of Aberdeen in the UK.
Instead, childhood mental ability and intellectual engagement
throughout life seem most related to cognitive scores after age 65,
he said.
"This idea is more about what you enjoy and gravitate toward
throughout your life," Staff said in a telephone interview. "Smart
people want to engage rather than go home and not do anything."
Staff and colleagues were able to factor-in childhood ability when
looking at decline in later years by analyzing data from
Scotland-wide testing in 1947 of all children born in 1936. Some of
these students were recruited into a long-term study of aging when
they were 64 and came back for testing up to five times over the
next 15 years.
During these visits, a psychologist administered tests to evaluate
memory and mental processing speed.
Staff's team focused on about 500 participants, and also looked at
their scores on a questionnaire measuring intellectual engagement,
which the researchers defined as people's interest, enjoyment and
participation in reading, problem solving and thinking about
abstract ideas as well as their overall intellectual curiosity.
Overall, they found that early-life intellectual measures were
associated with later-in-life engagement levels. In particular,
early and continuing intellectual engagement in problem solving
activities was tied to delayed cognitive decline in old age.
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Nevertheless, cognitive performance declined for everyone over time
by about one point per year, indicating that decline can't be
prevented, Staff said.
"We were expecting to find an association between intellectual
engagement and the trajectory of decline and the received wisdom of
'use it or lose it,'" Staff noted. "That seems important in terms of
the group of friends and the interests you have to start with but
not the rate of decline."
If decline starts from a higher level of cognitive ability, it will
likely take longer to reach a level that is noticeable or interferes
with functioning, the study team writes.
"The higher up the mountain you are, the more you can lose before
you're impaired," Staff said. "Essentially, people shouldn't be
afraid of a difficult task in front of them and should acquire a
language or musical skill or tackle that dense novel."
Although cognition declines with age, targeted cognitive training
programs can improve certain specific abilities later in life, said
Karlene Ball of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who wasn't
involved in the current study.
In her own research, she says, she has "found that improved
cognition is long-lasting in that those who are trained are still
better than they were prior to training, even after 5-10 years."
"Novelty is important," she told Reuters Health by email.
"Participants needed to be continually challenged by novel tasks
which push them to greater and greater difficulty levels . . . which
can provide people with a higher cognitive ability level to sustain
function into later life."
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2UG3h9f The BMJ, online December 10, 2018.
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